From The World Cross-Country Championship Archives- The Day Boomer Cadger Hit The High White Note  

By Bart Webber

Yes, I am once again going back to the old days, the old track and cross-country running days which probably saved me from landing in some godforsaken jail like a few other North Adamsville corner boys or down in some ditch, some nameless potter’s field early grave last hurrah. At the very least it blew off enough steam when I could not take the anger which was blowing up my family home that I survived in one piece, although that too was a close thing, very close. But this stuff, these memories pings are not about me, although I wish they were, but about a guy who I ran against who ran like the wind, Boomer Cadger.

I have mentioned previously that I have running this stuff, running his photos too in the hope, the forlorn hope maybe that he would respond. So far all I have been able to find out about him, about his fate, is earlier stuff from his high school friend John Franklin whom I have been in contact with through social media, the place where I thought I might get a draw from Boomer. Without exaggeration pound for pound Boomer was the greatest runner, cross-country runner, running like a deer, of our generation and if a few things had gone slightly differently Boomer would have a much larger place in the archives of the world junior cross-country championships, the place where such skills were seriously recognized.            

An event I had not heard about since I had obviously lost contact with Boomer’s career after we graduated from high school and he no longer could beat my ass to the ground was the NYU Invitational Cross-Country Championship held in Van Cortlandt Park out Bronx-way (I think) in the summer after graduation. As far as I knew at the time from what I had heard about his homelife filled with drunken father and doped-up mother was he had enlisted in the Navy, half expecting to run for that outfit after no colleges offered him anything like a scholarship in the days when road running was seen as a perversion of nature. John Franklin filled me in on this event and I will weave that exploit into my story below and see if this lures the Boomer out.   

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Boomer Cadger ran like the wind, was like the wind. Maybe today you can see guys and gals too who run like gazelles, deer animals like that loping along to your almost jogging like beat but back then if you were looking it was mostly guys like me beating the pavement to some pedestrian beat. I have tried to emphasize that in the various archival captions I have presented of late surrounding my own youth as a cross-country runner running up against my rival from North Quincy High School about twenty miles from North Adamsville where I grew up. I have also tried to cut him down to size a bit although not too much I hope since for most of my career I bit his dust. The only reason all of this even came up initially was that a few of us from the old days were having drinks one night at Jimmy Jack’s Pub and we got into the inevitable “who was the best you ever saw” in various high school sports in our time. In the early 1960s before sports even at the high school level became major money-makers and the aim of sports outfits. (For example, the so-called track shoes of the day today would have the manufacturers in court to explain their role in the rate of increase in knee replacements by those looking for legal recourse. Yes, they were that flimsy maybe worse)         

Most of those present were “real” sports players like Tiger McPhee a football player who naturally picked our own run over everything that moved fullback Thunder Thornton from our high school who led the Warriors to a state divisional championship. Others like Bees Devine picked scoring machine Slim Davis who played for the Knicks for a while before they got Earl “the Pearl” Monroe to carry them from Reading High in basketball. I, of course, picked Boomer Cadger from main rival North Quincy even if with some still present resentment. When I went into the reasons the others were surprised about what I had learned about Boomer recently from his high school friend John Franklin who was something like the class historian at his school. John had told me that Boomer (real name William, Bill only recently learned by me from John) had been training on the sand at Adamsville Beach in the summer. This technique learned from the great mile world record-holder of the time Australian Herb Elliott and his monster of a coach, Percy something but a monster is all you need to really know. It only gets more testing-apparently Boomer also subscribed to the great triple gold medal long distance Olympic champion Emil Zatopek’s regime of interval sprint runs, many of them to build up speed and endurance.              

According to Franklin Boomer did this on his own since his coach was some old wino, some bag of bad humor who knew somebody in the school department who got him in  and who was just serving his teaching time grabbed since he was a World War II veteran with preference hanging around bothering young girls looking up their dresses and who knows what else. Connected to but clueless about training track and cross-country runners. (For example, he knew nada about running shoes but had a friend who owned Sammy’s Sports and so all the team had to buy their worthless shoes from him or run in cumbersome Chuck Taylor’s.) John said Boomer was always reading sports magazines so must have picked it up then when track and running got more play than today.

This is what I do know having raced against Boomer in both cross-country and track. Whatever drove him to excellent (or just to get out of what was a horrible home life) happened after eighth grade. You see I beat Boomer in the mile (the longest junior high school kids could go in sanctioned events) that year in a regional meet. Whipped his ass. Then the next fall in a regional cross-country meet he blew me away; I ate his dust. Thereafter he improved always more than I did and so  

this residual moan and groan. He would go on to a fifth-place finish in the world junior cross-country championships and then not much else. But he was like the wind in his prime. I wonder now whether that time I beat him in eighth grade didn’t spur him on, didn’t get him to the training magazines.    

Maybe yes, maybe no but what Franklin told me recently only makes it so obvious that with some serious coaching, maybe a trip to boarding school if somebody had taken an interest, maybe if he had gotten some tutoring or had been driven by the books as much as by the running he could have been a college wind, who knows in those days the Olympics could have loomed. If you had asked me when I started this so-called tribune to an opponent if that was in the cards I would have said no. But after Franklin told me about that race in New York, the NYU Invitational who knows. All I know is that only the best around get invited or dare to show up as in the case of Boomer.  

This is the race guys, college guys like skinny from hunger Ireland’s Emmett Riley from Villanova, well-trained guys like Jack Raines from NYU and Miles Archer from Saint Joseph’s have won. All those guys if I recall would go to the Olympics although I don’t think any won gold. So Boomer showed up on his way to Naval boot camp out in Lake Michigan I think it was. Showed up wearing his high school dead beat uniform and his tacky coach’s buddy Sammy suicidal track shoes. Showed up, paid his fee and meandered around waiting for the race to start keeping away from the big names he knew from his sports newspapers, Lenny Dodge, Carson Dorry, Lorn Davis. At the start of the race he was in maybe the third fourth row to keep from going out too fast with the speed boys from college. Smart move because that was a hot day. A hot day for Boomer too as he beat the whole freaking field by about sixty yards with one of his greatest sprint finishes. And you thought I was kidding when I compared him to the wind, picked him as the best ever in my sport in high school  

Yeah what old Boomer did that day was what I would later find out in jazz, in any music it seemed had hit that high white note everybody reached for.